[hingisundhorsa]

"For a thousand years, China has been ruled by a cognitive meritocracy selected through the highly competitive imperial exams. The brightest young men became the scholar-officials who ruled the masses, amassed wealth, attracted multiple wives, and had more children."

Author manages to squeeze a topping of first semester Introduction to China with a thick crust of massive unsubstantiated overreach.

"hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications."

Nice autopraise, mildly disguised.

"After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness."

Seriously? There was an otherwise intelligent guy working for us who started spouting this kind of drivel. We noticed it all started after he got assigned a female manager and then subsequently a non-white manager. Some people have mild racial hangups, which they then externalize in odd ways like China peril.

[wavegeek]

I too am rather skeptical of the claim of 15 points per generation.

Look at the intense selection on the Ashkenazi Jews over maybe 1500 years which has only produced an average IQ of 115 (there are alternate theories for their high IQs).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence

Selection of dog breeds for intelligence (German Shepherds, Jack Russell terriers, Poodles vs eg King Charles Cavaliers, Corgis) seems to have produced a large gap but it took a long time - dogs have been domesticated for ~5,000 years.

Generally selection works quickly at first, by filtering the population for the desired trait. Then it slows dramatically as the process is limited by new beneficial mutations which are rare.

It is noteworthy that genes for high IQ seem to come at a price. Read up about Einstein's son Eduard for example.

Final point: maybe parents will not want to select for IQ. Maybe they would prefer to select for beautiful daughters for example?

[redthrowaway]

>Selection of dog breeds for intelligence (German Shepherds, Jack Russell terriers, Poodles vs eg King Charles Cavaliers, Corgis) seems to have produced a large gap but it took a long time - dogs have been domesticated for ~5,000 years.

Dogs have been domesticated since the dawn of civilization (and probably before), but those specific breeds are relatively new. GSDs are just over a century old, Jack Russells slightly older, poodles several hundred years old and Corgis positively ancient at almost 1000. Note, too, that intelligence was not the sole quality they were bred for. The Russian Silver Fox is a great example of the massive changes that can occur in only a few generations if artificial selection for a single trait is performed.

That said, I agree with the gist of your argument: 15 pts of Iq per generation seems ludicrous.

[monkeypizza]

The selection in Ashkenazi was not done in the same way proposed here - filtering took whole lifetimes. In this system, you compress the whole "live 50 years and have slightly more / fewer children" step into one procedure.

This one is equivalent to picking the best one of 50 naturally occurring children, and raising them alone, every generation.

If Michael Jordan he had 50 children with a similarly elite mother, most of them would regress to the mean - but the best one could conceivably be near his level. If he had only one kid, it's very likely that the kid would regress significantly.

Also, of course there are negatives to high IQ but most of the time, this selection method wouldn't be done for that level. Two people of IQ 100 would be able to reliably have children of IQ 115, and those kids would have happier, longer, healthier lives, with no increased risks. [see the scottish IQ study; iq at age 11 was linked to a lifetime of better outcomes]

That is the real benefit of this technology - to give people the option of gradually bringing out the best of what's already inside themselves. I don't want to be forced to give my kids a random selection of my genes - I want to exercise some control. And of course there could be problems - perhaps +IQ genes might lie next to other, undetected bad genes. But that's random, and we're already completely subject to it.

[guelo]

The Ashkenazi thing is bullshit. If you follow the references in the Wikipedia article looking for hard statistical evidence of higher IQ you end up with very thin sourcing from two iffy papers.

[lacker]

The Flynn effect in the U.S. already seems to be causing about 3 points of IQ gain per decade. If a generation is 25 years, that's 7.5 IQ points per generation. It doesn't seem unreasonable that if you explicitly selected for this trait you could double the rate of evolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Rise_in_IQ

[tzs]

> dogs have been domesticated for ~5,000 years

That's way too low. It's somewhere in the 19-32k year range: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38279/...

[yummyfajitas]

I'm having difficulty understanding your reasoning. To summarize what I have understood:

1. Author is arrogant, and by innuendo he is also sexist/racist.

2. ???

3. Author is wrong.

Step 2 is where I'm not following your logic.

[quanticle]

It's not a causal chain. The author is racist, and he is also wrong.

[isomorphic]

> sets of IQ-predicting alleles

This bothered me more than the autopraise. He (and, if he is to be believed, China) are proceeding from the assumption that IQ can be reduced to a set of switches in the genome.

What if there are alleles that select for intelligence--but also select for a mixture of cancer, OCD, suicidal depression, and plain batshit crazy?

[hawkice]

It's also worth considering that your hypothetical might be anything but! At extremely high levels of intelligence the rate of extreme social disorders skyrockets up to "most" (I recall the cutoff for 50% happening at ~165 IQ, but it continues to rise even after that, limited primarily by our lack of data on IQs much higher). I'm not entirely sure if this analogy is appropriate, but just as organisms with more cells are more likely to produce cancer, it seems minds with more thoughts racing through them are just as damaged by some small percentage of errant thoughts (some are extreme delusions, some are just the product of the isolation of a brilliant mind growing tired of a world, retreating from it, losing touch with how to interact with excellence and subtlety, and seeing even less subtlety in the world, simply growing more tired of it, ending with many extremely intelligent people simply unable to interact with others in any normal way).

[Zuider]

>...but also select for a mixture of cancer, OCD, suicidal depression, and plain batshit crazy?

1.3 billion bald, cat cradling, evil geniuses, all saying "mbwah, ha ha" in eerie synchronicity?

[nulltype]

What about the assumption that intelligence can be reduced to an IQ number?